And
now this is ‘an inheritance’ –Upright, rudimentary,
unshiftably plankedIn the long
ago, yet willable forward

Again and again and again.

1 BEOWULF:
THE POEM

The poem called Beowulf
was composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the end of
the tenth century of the first millennium, in the language that is today
called Anglo-Saxon or Old English. It is a heroic narrative, more than
three thousand lines long, concerning the deeds of a Scandinavian prince,
also called Beowulf, and it stands as one of the foundation works of poetry
in English. The fact that the English language has changed so much in
the last thousand years means, however, that the poem is now generally
read in translation and mostly in English courses at schools and universities.
This has contributed to the impression that is was written (as Osip Madelstam
said of The Divine Comedy) ‘on official paper’, which is unfortunate,
since what we are dealing with is a work of the greatest imaginative vitality,
a masterpiece where the structuring of the tale is as elaborate as the
beautiful contrivances of its language. Its narrative elements may belong
to a previous age but as a work of art it lives in its own continuous
present, equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time.

The poem was written in England
but the events it describes are set in Scandinavia, in a ‘once upon a
time’ that is partly historical. Its hero, Beowulf, is the biggest presence
among the warriors in the land of the Geats, a territory situated in what
is now southern Sweden, and early in the poem Beowulf crosses the sea
to the land of the Danes in order to rid their country of a man-eating
monster called Grendel. From this expedition (which involves him in a
second contest with Grendel’s mother) he returns in triumph and eventually
rules for fifty years as king of his homeland. Then a dragon begins to
terrorize the countryside and Beowulf must confront it. In a final climatic
encounter, he does manage to slay the dragon, but he also meets his own
death and enters the legends of his people as a warrior of high renown.

We know about the poem more
or less by chance, because it exists in one manuscript only. The unique
copy (now in the British Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth
century and was then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited,
translated and adapted, interpreted and taught, until it has become an
acknowledged classic. For decades it has been a set book on English syllabuses
at university level all over the world. The fact that many English departments
require it to be studied in the original continues to generate resistance,
most notably at Oxford University, where the pros and cons of the inclusion
of part of it as a compulsory element in the English course have been
debated regularly in recent years.

For generations of undergraduates,
academic study of the poem was often just a matter of construing the meaning,
getting a grip on the grammar and vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, and being
able to recognize, translate and comment upon random extracts that were
presented in the examinations. For generations of scholars too the interest
had been textual and philological; then there developed a body of research
into analogues and sources, a quest for stories and episodes in the folklore
and legends of the Nordic peoples that would parallel or foreshadow episodes
in Beowulf. Scholars were also preoccupied with fixing the exact
time and place of the poem’s composition, paying minute attention to linguistic,
stylistic and scribal details. More generally, they tried to establish
the history and genealogy of the dynasties of Swedes, Geats and Deanes
to which the poet makes constant allusion; and they devoted themselves
to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what extent
(if at all) the newly established Christian religion, which was fundamental
to the poet’s intellectual formation, displaced him from his imaginative
at-homeness in the world of his poem – a pagan Germanic society governed
by heroic code of honour, one where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess
among the living overwhelms any concern about the soul’s destiny in the
afterlife.

However, when it comes to
considering Beowulf as a work of literature, one publication stands
out. In 1936, the Oxford scholar and teacher J.R.R. Tolkien published
an epoch-making paper entitled Beowulf: The Monsters and
the Critics, which took for granted the poem’s integrity and distinction
as a work of art and proceeded to show in what this integrity and distinction
inhered. Tolkien assumed that the poet had felt his way through the inherited
material – the fabulous elements and the traditional accounts of an heroic
past – and by a combination of creative intuition and conscious structuring
had arrived at a unity of effect and a balanced order. He assumed in other
words, that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than
some kind of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore and
philology. Tolkien’s brilliant literary treatment changed the way the
poem was valued and initiated a new era – and new terms – of appreciation.

It is impossible to attain
a full understanding and estimate of Beowulf without recourse to
this immense body of commentary and elucidation. Nevertheless, readers
coming to the poem for the first time are likely to experience something
other than mere discomfiture when faced with the strangeness of the names
and the immediate lack of known reference points. An English-speaker new
to The Iliad or The Odyssey or The Aeneid will probably
at least have heard of Troy and Helen, or of Penelope and the Cyclops,
or of Dido and the Golden Bough. These epics may be in Greek and Latin,
yet the classical heritage has entered the cultural memory enshrined in
English so thoroughly that their worlds are more familiar than that of
the first native epic, even thought it was composed centuries after them.
Achilles rings a bell, not Scyld Scfing.
Ithaca leads the mind in a certain direction, but not Heorot. The
Sibyl of Cumae will stir certain associations, but not bad Queen Modthryth.
First-time readers of Beowulf very quickly rediscover the meaning
of the term ‘the Dark Ages’, and it is in the hope of dispelling some
of the puzzlement they are bound to feel that I have added the marginal
glosses that appear in the following pages.

Still, in spite of the sensation
of being caught between a ‘shield-wall’ of opaque references and a ‘word-hoard’
that is old and strange, such readers are also bound to feel a certain
‘shock of the new’. This is because the poem possesses a mythic potency.
Like Shield Sheafson (as Scyld Scfing
is known in this translation), it arrived from somewhere beyond the known
bourne of our experience, and having fulfilled its purpose (again like
Shield) it passes once more into the beyond. In the intervening time,
the poet conjures up a work as remote as Shield’s funeral boat borne towards
the horizon, as commanding as the horn-pronged gables of King Hrothgar’s
hall, as solid and dazzling as Beowulf’s funeral pyre that is set ablaze
at the end. These opening and closing scenes retain a haunting presence
in the mind; they are set pieces but they have the life-marking power
of certain dreams. They are like the pillars of the gate of horn, through
which the wise dreams of true art can still be said to pass.

What happens in between is
what W.B. Yeats would have called a phantasmagoria. Three agons – three
struggles in which the preternatural force-for-evil of the hero’s enemies
comes springing at him in demonic shapes; three encounters with what the
critical literature and the textbook glossaries call ‘the monsters’ –
in three archetypal sites of fear; the barricaded night-house, the infested
underwater current and the reptile-haunted rocks of a wilderness. If we
think of the poem in this way, its place in world art becomes clearer
and more secure. We can conceive of it re-presented and transformed in
performance in a bunraku theatre in Japan, where the puppetry and
the poetry are mutually supportive, a mixture of technicolor spectacle
and ritual chant. Or we can equally envisage it as an animated cartoon
(and there has been at least one shot at this already), full of mutating
graphics and minatory stereophonics. We can avoid, at any rate, the slightly
cardboard effect that the word ‘monster’ tends to introduce, and give
the poem a fresh chance to sweep ‘in off the moors, down through the mist-bands’
of Anglo-Saxon England, forward into the global village of the third millennium.

Nevertheless, the dream element
and overall power to haunt come at a certain readerly price. The poem
abounds in passages that will leave an unprepared audience bewildered.
Just when the narrative seems ready to take another step ahead, it sidesteps.
For a moment it is as if we have been channel-surfed into another poem,
and at two points in this translation I indicate that we are in fact participating
in a poem-within-our-poem not only by the use of italics, but by a slight
quickening of pace and shortening of metrical rein. The passages comprise
lines 883–914 and 1070–158, and on each occasion a minstrel has begun
to chant a poem as part of the celebration of Beowulf’s achievements.
In the former case, the minstrel expresses his praise by telling the story
of Sigemund’s victory over a dragon, which both parallels Beowulf’s triumph
over Grendel and prefigures his fatal encounter with the wyrm in
his old age. In the latter – the most famous of what were once called
the ‘digressions’ in the poem, the one dealing with a fight between Danes
and Frisinas at the stronghold of Finn, the Frsian king – the song the
minstrel sings has a less obvious bearing on the immediate situation of
the hero, but its import is nevertheless central to both the historical
and imaginative worlds of the poem.

The ‘Finnsburg episode’ immerses
us in a society that is at once honour-bound and blood-stained, presided
over by the laws of the blood-feud, where the kin of a person slain are
bound to exact a price for the death, wither by slaying the killer or
by receiving satisfaction in the form of wergild (the ‘man-price’),
a legally fixed compensation. The claustrophobic and doomladen atmosphere
of this interlude gives the reader an intense intimation of what wyrd,
or fate, meant not only to the character in the Finn story but to those
participating in the main action of Beowulf itself. All conceive
of themselves as hooped within the great wheel of necessity, in thrall
to a code of loyalty and bravery, bound to seek glory in the eye of the
warrior world. The little nations are grouped around their lord; the greater
nations spoil for war and menace the little ones; a lord dies, defencelessness
ensues; the enemy strikes; vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic for
the living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed; the wheel turns, the generations
tread and tread and tread – which is what I meant above when I said that
the import of the Finnsburg passage is central to the historical and imaginative
worlds of the poem as a whole.

One way of reading Beowulf
is to think of it as three agons in the hero’s life, but another way would
be to regard it as a poem that contemplates the destinies of three peoples
by tracing their interweaving histories in the story of the central character.
First we meet the Danes – variously known as Shieldings (after Shield
Sheafson, the founder of their line), the Ingwins, the Spear-Danes, the
Bright-Danes, the West-Danes, and so on – a people in the full summer
of their power, symbolized by the high hall built by King Hrothgar, one
‘meant to be a wonder of the world’ The threat to this superb people comes
from within their own borders, from marshes beyond the pale, from the
bottom of the haunted mere where ‘Cain’s clan’, in the shape of Grendel
and his troll-dam, trawl and scavenge and bide their time. But it also
comes from without, from the Heathobards, for example, whom the Danes
have defeated in battle and from whom they can therefore expect retaliatory
war (see lines 2020-69).

Beowulf actually predicts
this turn of events when he goes back to his own country after saving
the Danes (for the time being, at any rate) by staving off the two ‘reavers
from hell’. In the hall of his ‘ring-giver’, Hygelac, lord of the Geats,
the hero discourses about his adventures in a securely fortified cliff-top
enclosure. But this security is only temporary, for it is the destiny
of the Geat people to be left lordless in the end. Hygelac’s alliances
eventually involve him in deadly war with the Swedish king, Ongentheow,
and even though he does not personally deliver the fatal stroke (two of
his thanes are responsible for this – see lines 2484–9 and then the lengthier
reprise of this incident at lines 2922–3003), he is known in the poem
as ‘Ongentheow’s killer’. Hence it comes to pass that after the death
of Beowulf, who eventually succeeds Hygelac, the Geats experience a great
foreboding and the poem closes in a mood of sombre expectation. A world
is passing away, the Swedes and others are massing on the borders to attack
and there is no lord or hero to rally the defence.

The Swedes, therefore, are
the third nation whose history and destiny are woven into the narrative,
and even though no part of the main action is set in their territory,
they and their kings constantly stalk the horizon of dread within which
the main protagonists pursue their conflicts and allegiances. The Swedish
dimension gradually becomes an important element in the poem’s emotional
and imaginative geography, a geography that entails, it should be said,
no clear map-sense of the world, more an apprehension of menaced borders,
of danger gathering beyond the mere and the marshes, of mearc-stapas
‘prowling the moors, huge marauders / from some other world’.

Within these phantasmal boundaries,
each lord’s hall is an actual and a symbolic refuge. Here are heat and
light, rank and ceremony, human solidarity and culture; the duguþ
share the mead-benches with the geogoþ, the veterans with
their tales of warrior-kings and hero-saviours from the past rub shoulders
with young braves – þegnas, eorlas, thanes, retainers – keen
to win such renown in the future. The prospect of gaining a glorious name
in the wœl-rœs (the rush of battle-slaughter), the pride of defending
one’s lord and bearing heroic witness to the integrity of the bond between
him and his hall-companions – a bond sealed in the glo
and gidd of peace-time feasting and ring-giving – this is what
gave drive and sanction to the Germantic warrior-culture enshrined in
Beowulf.

Heorot and Hygelac’s hall
are the hubs of this value system upon which the poem’s action turns.
But there is another, outer rim of value, a circumference of understanding
within which the heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance
and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and culture,
one that has not been altogether shed but that has now been comprehended
as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise,
of course, from the poet’s Christianity and from his perspective as an
Englishman looking back at places and legends that his ancestors knew
before they made their migration from continental Europe to their new
home on the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude,
which is as composed as it is ardent, the port can view the story-time
of his poem with a certain historical detachment and even censure the
ways of those who lived in illo tempore:

Sometimes at pagan shrines
they vowedOfferings to idols,
swore oathsThat the killer of
souls might come to their aidAnd save the people.
That was their way,Their heathenish hope;
deep in their heartsThey remembered hell.[175–80]

At the same time, as a result
of his inherited vernacular culture and the imaginative sympathy that
distinguishes him as an artist, the poet can lend the full weight of his
rhetorical power to Beowulf as he utters the first principles of the northern
warrior’s honour-code:

It
is always betterTo avenge dear ones
than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us,
living in this worldMeans waiting for
our end. Let whoever canWin glory before death.
When a warrior is gone,That will be his best
and only bulwark.[1384–9]

In an age when ‘the instability
of the human subject’ is constantly argued for if not presumed, there
should be no problem with a poem that is woven from two such different
psychic fabrics. In fact, Beowulf perfectly answers the early modern
conception of a work of creative imagination as one in which conflicting
realities find accommodation within a new order; and this reconciliation
occurs, it seems to me, most poignantly and most profoundly in the poem’s
third section, once the dragon enters the picture and the hero in old
age must gather his powers for the final climactic ordeal. From the moment
Beowulf advances under the crags, into the comfortless arena bounded by
the rock-wall, the reader knows he is one of those ‘marked by fate’. The
poetry is imbued with a strong intuition of wyrd hovering close,
‘unknowable but certain’, and yet, because it is imagined within a consciousness
that has learned to expect that the soul will find an ultimate home ‘among
the steadfast ones’, this primal human emotion has been transmuted into
something less ‘zero at the bone’, more metaphysically tempered.

A similar transposition from
a plane of regard that is, as it were, helmeted and hall-bound to one
that sees things in a slightly more heavenly light is discernible in the
different ways the poet imagines gold. Gold is a constant element, gleaming
solidly in the underground vaults, on the breasts of queens or the arms
and regalia of warriors on the mead-benches. It is loaded into boats as
spoil, handed out in bent bars as hall-gifts, buried in the earth as treasure,
persisting underground as an affirmation of a people’s glorious past and
an elegy for it. It pervades the ethos of the poem and adds luster to
its diction. And yet the bullion with which Waels’s son Sigemund weighs
down the hold after an earlier dragon-slaying triumph (in the old days,
long before Beowulf’s time) is a more trustworthy substance than that
which is secured behind the walls of Beowulf’s barrow. By the end of the
poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the Christian vision. It is not
that it yet equals the riches in the medieval sense of worldly corruption,
just that its status as the ore of all value has been put in doubt. It
is lne, transitory,
passing from hand to hand, and its changed status is registered as a symptom
of the changed world. Once the dragon is disturbed, the melancholy and
sense of displacement that pervade the last movement of the poem enter
the hoard as a disabling and ominous light. And the dragon himself, as
a genius of the older order, is bathed in this light, so that even as
he begins to stir, the reader has a premonition that the days of his empery
are numbered.

Nevertheless, the dragon has
a wonderful inevitability about him and a unique glamour. It is not that
the other monsters are lacking in presence and aura; it is more that they
remain, for all their power to terrorize, creatures of the physical world.
Grendel comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath
in the dark, a fear of collision with some hard-boned and immensely strong
android frame, a mixture of Caliban and hoplite. And while his mother
too has a definite brute-bearing about her, a creature of slouch and lunge
on land if seal-swift in the water, she nevertheless retains a certain
non-strangeness. As antagonists of a hero being tested, Grendel and his
mother possess an appropriate head-on strength. The poet may need them
as figures who do the devil’s work, but the poem needs them more as figures
who call up and show off Beowulf’s physical strength and his superb gifts
as a warrior. They are the right enemies for a young glory-hunter, instigators
of the formal boast, worthy trophies to be carried back from the grim
testing-ground – Grendel’s hand is ripped off and nailed up, his head
severed and paraded in Heorot. It is all consonant with the surge of youth
and the compulsion to win fame ‘as wide as the wind’s home, / as the sea
around cliffs’, utterly a manifestation of the Germanic heroic code.

Enter then, fifty years later,
the dragon – from his dry-stone vault, from a nest where he is heaped
in coils around the body-heated gold. Once he is wakened, there is something
glorious in the way he manifests, a Fourth of July effulgence fireworking
its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the centuries he has
spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency
about him. He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the
air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power, one that can
easily survive the prejudice that arises at the very mention of the word
‘dragon’. Whether in medieval art or modern Disney cartoons, the dragon
can strike us as far less horrific than he is meant to be, but in the
final movement of Beowulf he lodges himself in the imagination
as wyrd rather than wyrm, more a destiny than a set of reptilian
vertebrae.

Grendel and his mother enter
Beowulf’s life from the outside, accidentally, challenges which in other
circumstances he might not have taken up, enemies from whom he might have
been distracted or deflected. The dragon, on the other hand, is a given
of his home ground, abiding in his under-earth as in his understanding,
waiting for the meeting, the watcher at the ford, the questioner who sits
so sly, the ‘lion-limb’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins might have called him,
against whom Beowulf’s body and soul must measure themselves. Dragon equals
shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment
of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species – the knowledge, that is,
of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival.

It has often been observed
that all the scriptural references in Beowulf are to the Old Testament.
The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase
of things than with any transcendental promise. Beowulf’s mood as he gets
ready to fight the dragon – who could be read as a projection of Beowulf’s
own chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience – recalls the
mood of other tragic heroes: Oedipus at Colonus, Lear at his ‘ripeness
is all’ extremity, Hamlet in the last illuminations of his ‘prophetic
soul’:

No
easy bargainWould be made in that
place by any man.The veteran king sat
down on the cliff-top.He wished good luck
to the Geats who had sharedHis hearth and his
gold. He was sad at heart,
Unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.His fate hovered near,
unknowable but certain.

Here the poet attains a level
of insight that approaches the visionary. The subjective and the inevitable
are in perfect balance, what is solidly established is bathed in an element
that is completely sixth-sensed, and indeed the whole, slow-motion, constantly
self-deferring approach to the hero’s death and funeral continues to be
like this. Beowulf’s soul may not yet have fled ‘to its destined place
among the steadfast ones’, but there is already a beyond-the-grave aspect
to him, a revenant quality about his resoluteness. This is not just metrical
narrative full of anthropological interest and typical heroic-age motifs;
it is poetry of a high order, in which passages of great lyric intensity
– such as the ‘Lay of the Last Survivor’ (lines 2247-66) and, even more
remarkably, the so-called ‘Father’s Lament’ (2444-62) – rise like emanations
from some fissure in the bedrock of the human capacity to endure:

It was like the misery endured
by an old manWho has lived to see
his son’s bodySwing on the gallows.
He begins to keenAnd weep for his boy,
watching the ravenGloat where he hangs;
he can be of no help.The wisdom of age
is worthless to him.Morning after morning,
he wakes to rememberThat his child is
gone; he has no interestIn living on until
another heirIs born in the hall…Alone with his longing,
he lies down on his bedAnd sings a lament;
everything seems too large,The steadings and
the fields.

Such passages mark an ultimate
stage in poetic attainment; they are the imaginative equivalent of Beowulf’s
spiritual state at the end, when he tells his men that ‘doom of battle
will bear [their] lord away’, in the same way that the sea-journeys so
vividly described in lines 210-28 and lines 1903-24 are the equivalent
of his exultant prime.

At these moments of lyric
intensity, the keel of the poetry is deeply set in the element of sensation
while the mind’s lookout sways metrically and far-sightedly in the element
of pure comprehension – which is to say that the elevation of Beowulf
is always, paradoxically, buoyantly down-to-earth. And nowhere is this
more obviously and memorably the case than in the account of the hero’s
funeral with which the poems ends. Here the inexorable and the elegiac
combine in a description of the funeral pyre being got ready, the body
being burnt and the barrow being constructed – a scene at once immemorial
and oddly contemporary. The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames
consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century
news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into
the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events
and who are now being exposed to the comfortless future. We immediately
recognize her predicament and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves
the better for having them expressed with such adequacy, dignity and unforgiving
truth:

On a height they kindled
the hugest of allFuneral fires; fumes
of woodsmokeBillowed darkly up,
the blaze roaredAnd drowned out their
weeping, wind died downAnd flames wrought
havoc in the hot bone-house,Burning it to the
core. They were disconsolateAnd wailed aloud for
their lord’s decease.A Geat woman too sang
out in grief;With hair bound up,
she unburdened herselfOf her worst fears,
a wild litanyOf nightmare and lament:
her nation invaded,Enemies on the rampage,
bodies in piles,Slavery and abasement.
Heaven swallowed the smoke.

2 ABOUT
THIS TRANSLATION

When I was an undergraduate
at Queen’s University, Belfast, I studied Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon
poems and developed not only a feel for the language, but a fondness for
the melancholy and fortitude that characterized the poetry. Consequently,
when an invitation to translate the poem arrived from the editors of
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, I was tempted to try my
hand. While I had no great expertise in Old English, I had a strong desire
to get back to the first stratum of the language and to ‘assay the hoard’(line
2509). This was during the middle years of the 1980s, when I had begun
a regular teaching job in Harvard and was opening my ear to the unmoored
speech of some contemporary American poetry. Saying yes to the Beowulf
commission would be (I argued with myself) a kind of aural antidote, a
way of ensuring that my linguistic anchor would stay lodged on the Anglo-Saxon
sea-floor. So I undertook to do it.

Very soon, however, I hesitated.
It was labour-intensive work, scriptorium-slow. I proceeded dutifully
like a sixth-former at homework. I would set myself twenty lines a day,
write out my glossary of hard words in longhand, try to pick a way through
the syntax, get the run of the meaning established in my head and then
hope that the lines could be turned into metrical shape and raised to
the power of verse. Often, however, the whole attempt to turn it into
modern English seemed to me like trying to bring down a megalith with
a toy hammer. What had been so attractive in the first place, the hand-built,
rock-sure feel of the thing, began to defeat me. I turned to other work,
the commissioning editors did not pursue me, and the project went into
abeyance.

Even so, I had an instinct
that it should not be let go. An understanding I had worked out for myself
concerning my own linguistic and literary origins made me reluctant to
abandon the task. I had noticed, for example, that without any conscious
intent on my part certain lines in the first poem in my first book conformed
to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics. These lines were made up of
two balancing halves, each half containing two stressed syllables – ‘The
spade sinks into gravelly ground: /
My father digging. I look down…’ –
and in the case of the second line there was alliteration linking ‘digging’
and ‘down’ across the caesura. Part of me, in other words, had been writing
Anglo-Saxon from the start.

This was not surprising, given
that the poet who had first formed my ear was Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins
was a chip off the Old English block, and the earliest lines I published
when I was a student were as much pastiche Anglo-Saxon as they were pastiche
Hopkins: ‘Starling thatch-watches and sudden swallow / Straight breaks
to mud-nest, home-rest rafter’, and so on. I have written about all this
elsewhere and about the relation of my Hopkins ventriloquism to the speech
patterns of Ulster – especially as these were caricatured by the poet
W. R. Rodgers. Ulster people, according to Rodgers, are ‘an abrupt people
/ who like the spiky consonants of speech / and think the soft ones cissy’,
and get a kick out of ‘anything that gives or takes attack / like Micks,
Teagues, tinkers’ gets, Vatican’.

Joseph Brodsky once said that
poets' biographies are present in the sounds they make and I suppose all
I am saying is that I consider Beowulf to be part of my voice-right. And
yet to persuade myself that I was born into its language and that its
language was born into me took a while: for somebody who grew up in the
political and cultural conditions of Lord Brookeborough’s Northern Ireland,
it could hardly have been otherwise.

Sprung from an Irish nationalist
background and educated at a Northern Irish Catholic school, I had learned
the Irish language and lived within a cultural and ideological frame that
regarded it as the language that I should by rights have been speaking
but I had been robbed of. I have also written, for example, about the
thrill I experienced when I stumbled upon the word lachtar in my
Irish-English dictionary, and found that this word, which my aunt had
always used when speaking of a flock of chicks, was in fact an Irish language
word, and more than that, an Irish word associated in particular with
County Derry. Yet here it was surviving in my aunt’s English speech generations
after her forebears and mine had ceased to speak Irish. For a long time,
therefore, the little word was – to borrow a simile from Joyce – like
a rapier point of consciousness pricking me with an awareness of language-loss
and cultural dispossession, and tempting me into binary thinking about
language. I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues,
as either/or conditions rather than both/and, and this was an attitude
that for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and
creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question – the question,
that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history and
literary tradition in Ireland.

Luckily, I glimpsed that possibility
of release from this kind of cultural determination early on, in my first
arts year at Queen’s University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the
history of the English Language by Professor John Braidwood. Braidwood
could not help informing us, for example, that the word ‘whiskey’ is the
same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce, meaning water,
and that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some extent the River
Uisce (or Whiskey); and so in my mind the stream was suddenly turned into
a kind of linguistic river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto-British
Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak pouring out of the
cleft rock of some prepolitical, prelapsarian, urphilological Big Rock
Candy Mountain – and all of this had a wonderfully sweetening effect upon
me. The Irish/English duality, the Celtic/Saxon antithesis were momentarily
collapsed and in the resulting etymological eddy a gleam of recognition
flashed through the synapses and I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential
that seemed at the time to be a somewhere being remembered. The place
on the language map where the Usk and the uisce and the whiskey
coincided was definitely a place where the spirit might find a loophole,
an escape route from what John Montague has called ‘the partitioned intellect’,
away into some unpartitioned linguistic country, a region where one’s
language would not be simply a badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural
preference or an official imposition, but an entry into further language.
And I eventually came upon one of these loopholes in Beowulf itself.

What happened was that I found
in the glossary to C. L. Wrenn’s edition of the poem the Old English word
meaning ‘to suffer’, the word þolian; and although at first
it looked completely strange with its thorn symbol instead of the
familiar th, I gradually realized that it was not strange at all,
for it was the word that older and less educated people would have used
in the country where I grew up. ‘They’ll just have to learn to thole,’
my aunt would say about some family who had suffered through an unforeseen
bereavement. And now suddenly here was ‘thole’ in the official textual
world, mediated through the apparatus of a scholarly edition, a little
bleeper to remind me that my aunt’s language was not just a self-enclosed
family possession but an historical heritage, one that involved the journey
þolian had made north into Scotland and then across unto
Ulster with the planters, and then across from the planters to the locals
who had originally spoken Irish, and then farther across again when the
Scots Irish emigrated to the American South in the eighteenth century.
When I read in John Crowe Ransom the line, ‘Sweet ladies, long may ye
bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole’, my heart lifted again, the world
widened, something was furthered. The far-flungness of the word, the phenomenological
pleasure of finding it variously transformed by Ransom’s modernity and
Beowulf’s venerability made me feel vaguely something for which
again I only found the words years later. What I was experiencing as I
kept meeting up with thole on its multi-cultural odyssey was the
feeling that Osip Madelstam once defined as a nostalgia for world
culture’. And this was a nostalgia I didn’t even know I suffered until
I experienced its fulfillment in this little epiphany. It was as if, on
the analogy of baptism by desire, I had undergone something like illumination
by philology. And even though I did not know it at the time, I had by
then reached the point where I was ready to translate Beowulf.
þolian had opened my right of way.

So, in a sense, the decision
to accept Norton’s invitation was taken thirty-five years before the invitation
was actually issued. But between one’s sense of readiness to take on a
subject and the actual inscription of the first lines, there is always
a problematic hiatus. To put it another way: from the point of view of
the writer, words in a poem need what the Polish poet Anna Swir once called
‘the equivalent of a biological right to life’. The erotics of composition
are essential to the process, some prereflective excitation and orientation,
some sense that your own little verse-craft can dock safe and sound at
the big quay of the language. And this is as true for translators as it
is for poets attempting original work.

I called them ‘big-voiced’
because when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came
across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined
as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf. A simple sentence such
as ‘We cut the corn today’ took on immense dignity when one of the Scullions
spoke it. They had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as
if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. And when
I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version,
I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives. I therefore
tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited
their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:

Conventional renderings of
hwæt, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic
literary, with ‘lo’, ‘hark’, ‘behold’, ‘attend’ and – more colloquially
– ‘listen’ being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English
Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because
in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous
discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation
calling for immediate attention. So, ‘so’ it was:

So. The Spear-Danes in days
gone byand the kings who
ruled them had courage and greatness.We have heard of those
princes’ heroic campaigns.

I came to the task of translating
Beowulf with a prejudice in favour of forthright delivery. I remembered
the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction
was ornate and the narrative method at times oblique. What I had always
loved was a kind of foursquareness about the utterance, a feeling of living
inside a constantly indicative mood, in the presence of an understanding
that assumes you share an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s
sense of the world that gives his lines immense emotional credibility
and allows him to make general observations about life that are far too
grounded in experience and reticence to be called ‘moralizing’. These
so-called ‘gnomic’ parts of the poems have the cadence and force of earned
wisdom, and their combination of cogency and verity was again something
that I could remember from the speech I heard as a youngster in the Scullion
kitchen. When I translate lines 24-5 as ‘Behaviour that’s admired / is
that path to power among people everywhere’, I am attending as much to
the grain of my original vernacular as to the content of the Anglo-Saxon
lines. But then the evidence suggests that this middle ground between
oral tradition and the demands of written practice was also the ground
occupied by the Beowulf poet. The style of the poem is hospitable
to the kind of formulaic phrases that are the stock-in-trade of oral bards,
and yet it is marked too by the self-consciousness of an artist convinced
that ‘we must labour to be beautiful’.

In one area, my own labours
have been less than thorough-going. I have not followed the strict metrical
rules that bound the Anglo-Saxon scop. I have been guided by the
fundamental pattern of four stresses to the line, but I allow myself several
transgressions. For, example, I don’t always employ alliteration, and
sometimes I alliterate only in one half line. When these breaches occur,
it is because I prefer to let the natural ‘sound of sense’ prevail over
the demands of the convention: I have been reluctant to force an artificial
shape or an unusual word choice just for the sake of correctness.

In general, the alliteration
varies from the shadowy to the substantial, from the properly to the improperly
distributed. Substantial and proper are such lines as

The fórtunes
of wár fávoured
Hróthgar (line 64)

the híghest in the
lánd, would lénd
advíce (line 172)

and fínd fríendship in
the Fáther’s embráce (line 188)

Here the caesura is definite,
there are two stresses in each half of the line and the first stressed
syllable of the second half alliterates with the first or the second or
both of the stressed syllables in the first half. The main deviation from
this is one that other translators have allowed themselves – the freedom,
that is, to alliterate on the fourth stressed syllable, a practice that
breaks the rule but that never nevertheless does bind the line together:

We have héard of
those prínces’ heróic
campáigns (line 3)

and he cróssed
óver into the Lórd’s
kéeping (line 27)

In the course of the translation,
such deviations, distortions, syncopations and extensions do occur; what
I was after first and foremost was a narrative line that sounded as if
it meant business and I was prepared to sacrifice other things in pursuit
of this directness of utterance.

The appositional nature of
the Old English syntax, for example, is somewhat slighted here, as is
the Beowulf poet’s resourcefulness with synonyms and (to a less
extent) his genius for compound-making, kennings and all sorts of variation.
Usually – as at line 1209, where I render ðaful as ‘frothing wave-vat’, and at line 1523, where beado-loma
becomes ‘battle-torch’ – I try to match the poet’s analogy-seeking habit
at its most original; and I use all the common coinages for the lord of
the nation, variously referred to as ‘ring-giver’, ‘treasure-giver’, ‘his
people’s shield’ or ‘shepherd’ or ‘helmet’. I have been less faithful,
however, to the way the poet rings the changes when it comes to compounds
meaning a sword or a spear, or a battle or any bloody encounter with foes.
Old English abounds in vigorous, evocative and specifically poetic words
for these things, but I have tended to follow modern usage and in the
main have called a sword a sword.

There was one area, however,
where certain strangeness in the diction came naturally. In those instances
where a local Ulster word seemed either poetically or historically right,
I felt free to use it. For example, at lines 324 and 2988 I use the word
‘graith’ for ‘harness’, and at 3026 ‘hoked’ for ‘rooted about’, because
the local term seemed in each case to have special body and force. Then,
for reasons of historical suggestiveness, I have in several instances
used the word ‘bawn’ to refer to Hrothgar’s hall. In Elizabethan English,
bawn (from the Irish bó-dhún, a fort for cattle)
referred specifically to the fortified dwellings that the English planters
built in Ireland to keep the dispossessed natives at bay, so it seemed
the proper term to apply to the embattled keep where Hrothgar waits and
watches. Indeed, every time I read the lovely interlude that tells of
the minstrel singing in Heorot just before the first attacks of Grendel,
I cannot help thinking of Edmund Spenser in Kilcolman Castle, reading
the early cantos of The Faerie Queene to Sir Walter Raleigh, just
before the Irish would burn the castle and drive Spenser and Munster back
to the Elizabethan court. Putting a bawn into Beowulf seems one
way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest
and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism, a history
that has to be clearly acknowledged by all concerned in order to render
it ever more ‘willable forward / again and again and again’.

(Line numbers given
above refer to this translation, not to the Anglo-Saxon text.)